So naturally I was on the lookout for things I could learn from such a different sensibility, and something quickly and firmly leapt out at me. Livesey urged one student to more freely release basic information about setting and character identity, which the writer had artificially withheld in the interest of creating a small bit of suspense. It takes very little authorial energy to orient the reader in the sensory world of a fiction, she argued—to “take care of the reader,” as she put it—and failing to do so can leave the reader awash in distracting and unnecessary questions.

Since I picked up that phrase from Livesey, I don’t think I’ve run a workshop in which I haven’t used it, and over the years it has taken on a broader meaning for me. Taking care of the reader isn’t merely a matter of dispensing appropriate facts as necessary. It’s a commitment on a writer’s part to maintain the reader/writer relationship, and to honor the fact that readers co-create the work with their own voices and imaginations. Our works reach fruition through a symbiotic relationship with readers that we must attend to and maintain. If we offer them only a murky, imprecise experience, have we really held up our end of the bargain as writers?

In The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Margot Livesey certainly upholds hers. The novel, as its promotional campaign stresses, is a modern (set predominantly in the early 1960s) take on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Though the resemblances are close, including a five-part structure, they are not ponderous or strained. One could labor over the similarities between the characters, such as Brontë’s troubled gentleman Mr. Rochester and Livesey’s troubled gentleman Hugh Sinclair, or Brontë’s ill-fated schoolgirl Helen and Livesey’s ill-fated schoolgirl Miriam. But such comparisons are unnecessary when taking in The Flight of Gemma Hardy, and looking for them instead of letting Livesey’s tale live on its own merely distracts from it.

The book’s eponymous heroine Gemma, orphaned spawn of a Scottish mother and an Icelandic father, is in trouble from the start. Thrust into her aunt’s protection when her beloved uncle dies, she is treated as a servant girl and worse. The first movement of the novel, which covers Gemma’s escape from her adoptive family, filled me with unease over her physical and emotional safety in ways I did not expect. She is also a spooky, elvish girl, tending toward a receptivity to the supernatural that Livesey calls “second sight.” The first impression one gets of Gemma is of someone who will be frequently on the run, a delicate but scrappy survivor with no real place in the world who will land on her feet and create one.

Livesey might easily have pluralized the word Flight in her title, since her heroine is so continually escaping. She flees her family for a new kind of oppressiveness as a “charity student” (a euphemism for child laborer) at a girls’ boarding school, and must escape that when the school closes. She finds work as a governess on Scotland’s remote Orkney Islands, caring for the niece of banker/landowner Hugh Sinclair, whose clutches she also escapes. Her string of flights eventually brings her to Iceland, where she connects to the birth family she barely knew and had long since forgotten.

Throughout the book, Livesey gives us terrific atmospheres in which Gemma’s drama can unfold: the aunt’s house is positively Gothic, the boarding school Dickensian with lost hopes, the Orkney Islands packed with stark beauty. Publicity buzz on The Flight of Gemma Hardy calls it a “breakthrough book” for Livesey, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be. It’s ambitious—not many writers among us would risk treading on Charlotte Brontë’s toes—and although it leans on Jane Eyre, it insists on having a life of its own that does not depend on its famous predecessor. Livesey has been an outstanding writer for quite a while now, and Gemma is the work of a talented, assiduous novelist truly hitting her stride.

Interview

Steven Wingate: I’ve heard you speak eloquently about a subject most writers shy away from: the mid-career challenge of not “recycling” tropes and themes from your earlier work. The Flight of Gemma Hardy is your seventh novel, and it deals with landscapes (rural Scotland) and human situations (a young girl isolated) that appeared in your earlier books. How did you keep your imagination fresh for this novel, and what about the characters and material made you confident you could pull it off?

Margot Livesey: I had of course written about a young girl in rural Scotland in Eva Moves The Furniture but writing about Gemma felt like a different project in a number of very significant ways.  Eva is born in 1920 and grows up into the Second World War. Gemma is born after that war and what her future holds is that great tidal wave of feminism and women’s liberation that swept over Britain and the US in the late sixties and seventies. I purposefully set the novel before that tide took hold, at least in my part of Scotland.

Perhaps more crucially Gemma faces very immediate and personal adversity. After her uncle dies she is forced to fight her own battles, and she does so with determination. In writing her story I was trying to create not just a character but a heroine.

Advance reading copies of Gemma contain a “Dear Reader” note in which you speak of “writing back to Charlotte Brontë.” Did she continue that correspondence? By this I mean, did your relationship to her (and to Jane Eyre) as touchstones change over the course of the novel?

From the day I started writing Gemma I have not dared to look back at Jane Eyre but my relationship to the novel has undoubtedly changed. I am even more admiring than I used to be of Brontë’s wonderful use of setting to contain the five acts of her novel. And I love even more, in memory, the poetry of the passages between Rochester and Jane. I am also a little indignant on Jane’s behalf at Rochester’s sometimes cruel teasing and testing of her.  Perhaps Brontë felt that was necessary because of how unlikely it was that an aristocrat would marry a governess.

In this note you also talk about stealing from your own life. What thefts were you aware of when you began the novel, and what thefts did you discover along the way as you worked through the drafts? Do you feel a difference in the way you render conscious and unconscious borrowings?

I knew as I embarked on the novel that I would be making use of my difficult stepmother and the grim boarding school I attended for four years. Only as Gemma began to grow up did I discover that I would be drawing on my deep sense that books and exams were a way to escape my present life. As for the role that my romantic life played in my creation of Gemma’s, I think that’s best left to the reader’s imagination.

The book’s opening is quite propulsive, and gave me a sense of physical fear stronger than any I’d felt from your work before. There’s also more of the natural world in Gemma than I remember elsewhere; a stark Scottish landscape becomes, through the heroine’s observations, almost lush with birds and plants. Did you always conceive of the book as having so much elemental “fight or flight” physicality to it?

What a lovely question! Again I think, I hope, I learned from Brontë and her ability to make each of Jane’s five homes in the novel so vivid and so atmospheric. My father was an ardent bird watcher and it was one of the few activities that we shared. I can still recognise most Scottish birds by flight and song.  So it felt natural to make Gemma aware of birds who often seem so much freer than we. And of course this is linked to my desire to create a heroine, a young woman who goes out into the world and notices that world as she encounters dragons and struggles towards wholeness and happiness.

Another Jane hovers over this novel—a certain Ms. Austen—especially in the middle, when Gemma comes dangerously close to a rushed marriage. I think particularly of Mansfield Park because of the analogy between Gemma and Fanny Price, two poor daughters adrift in a class beyond their own. Austen’s works took place at the rise of the bourgeoisie, and Gemma Hardy deals with another soft revolution: the sixties. Did you feel yourself in conversation with Austen as well as Brontë?

I owe much to Austen’s keen sense of the importance of class, an importance that the Brontës, as a family, were always eager to ignore or minimise. Then too there is Austen’s wonderful ability to write satisfying romances that fundamentally depend on her heroines coming into their own.

Midway through the book Gemma has a line: “I shrank from wearing a dress whose history I didn’t know.” That says a lot about her sense of propriety, which makes her rather a prude. Her insistence on propriety often saves her, yet the deeper she gets into her own life story, the more dishonest she becomes. How did you feel about her as you brought her to the threshold of her choices?

Well propriety and honesty are, in my mind, rather different and indeed sometimes at odds. Gemma is troubled by her own dishonesty even as she tries to be responsible and perform whatever duties are demanded of her. But she is also sophisticated enough to realise that living under an assumed name is not the worst kind of lie. I have to confess that I was always, shamelessly, on Gemma’s side as she faces various trials and torments.

What’s your next project? Are you taking any down time, and if so how are you using it?

I am trying to do something that strikes me as hugely challenging: write a novel set in America.

Further Links and Resources

On the boat, we were mostly virgins.  We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves.  Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came for the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we’d been wearing for years – faded hand-me-downs form our sisters that had been patched and redyed many times.

As an introduction, this style of narration intrigues. As the mode for the entire book, will such artifice lose its charm?  I began to long for one character, one story, one plot I could hold onto.  Instead, I got a “list” novel.  Lists have long been employed, and with great effect, in poetry.  However, in a novel, merely listing what might happen to each ‘we’ in a narrative burdens the reader, and makes her complicit in the outcomes, no matter how beautifully the sentences string together.

Do we still need the Aristotelian notion of protagonist and antagonist?  Must one create rising tension?  Is a Greek chorus still drama?  How far can the bounds of narrative be stretched and still provide satisfaction?  Perhaps satisfaction is not Otsuka’s goal. The Buddha in the Attic puts forth a collective unconscious in which individuality, our particular stories, are rendered null and void.  These stories wind down many paths, as though Otsuka has thrown down the gauntlet: will the reader follow a story that explores each road, including those not taken?

Extra

Click the streaming audio below to hear Julie Otsuka interviewed on WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show:

Jody Lisberger taught fiction at Harvard with Joan Leegant, and they were MFA students together at Vermont College. This interview recently took place over email.

In terms of moving from stories to a novel, do you think writing a collection of stories made the job of writing a novel easier? Did having those prizes under your belt for your first book create pressure for your second?

Readers and writing students sometimes assume that writing stories is “practice” for writing a novel—that you start “small” and then grow—but I think most writers would say that’s not the case at all. Stories as an art form have their own set of demands. And lest anyone suggest that short fiction is a lesser art, we can look to the work of such story masters as Alice Munro, Grace Paley and Edith Pearlman, who won the 2011 PEN/Malamud Award for the Short Story and whose latest collection, Binocular Vision, was just nominated for the National Book Award.

That said, while writing stories first didn’t make writing a novel easier for me, writing fiction for a long time before tackling this particular novel made a difference. I began writing fiction around 1990 and published Wherever You Go in 2010. That’s 20 years. I teach writing, and one of the hardest things I’ve had to do is tell a student he or she needs to master more of the craft before shackling him/herself to a big project. It’s not that writing stories is easier; it’s just that you can labor on a story for a few months and then put it aside and start another. This allows you to let go of what’s not working and move on.

I was very grateful to have received those prizes. I was 53 years old when the collection came out, and a lot of water had flowed under the bridge by then. When I turned to the novel, I didn’t experience the prize-winning as pressure but as affirmation. Permission to keep going. A prolific story writer once told me that with each story she published, she was given permission to write another one. That’s what kept her submitting and submitting. That’s what those prizes felt like for me.

After writing stories, did you expect Wherever You Go to take seven years to complete? Why seven years?

I don’t entirely recall what I was thinking when I began the novel, which was actually the second half of a two-book contract (the first was the story collection)—probably more along the lines of it taking three or four years. It’s hard to sometimes remember why it took so long. It’s a little like childbirth: you don’t remember the pain, otherwise you’d never do it again. Though I can point to some factors. First, I wrote an entirely different story for a few years, about a group of young women in Jerusalem. When I finished, I saw that it was kind of flat, but on the sidelines were a couple of antsy guys who were almost pacing the perimeter of the narrative, begging to be explored. Who were they? Why were they so agitated? They had a lot of potential. So I pulled them forward and began to write their story, and eventually they became two of the main figures in Wherever You Go. I think that was in year three or so.

I also didn’t work on the book for seven solid years straight. I took a long break from the manuscript at one point, due to a medical issue, which was immediately followed by a visiting writer stint in Israel. All told, I didn’t look at the manuscript for almost nine months. It was the best thing I could have done. When I returned from Tel Aviv and looked at the pages, I knew exactly what I had to do. I wrote straight through and sent it to my agent and that was that. I’m not one of those writers who plans or outlines anything beforehand—thinking about a story doesn’t work for me, I have to discover it in the writing—so I’m groping my way for a very long time. I’ve learned to more or less trust the process and not get too anxious when I don’t know where I’m going for years on end.

One craft challenge is that you tell the story through three distinct and alternating third person points of view. How did you decide to use this structure? Were there points where you questioned your decision? What are the pitfalls to his approach that you think fiction writers should consider? What about the pleasures?

When I was still writing the unsuccessful story of the Jerusalem women, I was experimenting with a kind of omniscience—and it wasn’t working. There was too much distance; I couldn’t sink into any of the characters. I was also indulging an ironic, almost comic tone that was keeping me from getting at the truth of these people’s lives. It was, in retrospect, something of a defense on my part. I think I was reluctant to get inside these people for fear of what I’d find. As I said, that story was a little flat, and the flatness was related to the overly distant point of view. When I started over with the sideline characters, I wrote them in third-person and everything began to flow.

In terms of the structure, I knew from the get-go that I’d be exploring more than one person and that I was interested in the circumstances in which their paths would cross. So that dictated the structure. Three voices has a nice symmetry; it also lends itself to the image of a braid, which is how I ultimately saw the back-and-forth nature of the chapters. If you’ve ever made a braided bread—not coincidentally, the traditional Jewish challah is a braided bread—you also know that often you start the braiding in the middle, at the point where the three strands overlap most powerfully. That’s how it felt when constructing this book. I sensed early on, without knowing the specifics of the narrative, that the three lives would cross when a major event happened in the middle of the book. That too dictated the structure, even before I knew what that event was going to be.

Which is not to say the braiding was straightforward or obvious. I was continually rearranging the alternating sections. For a time, I thought I’d give 50 pages of the first character before shifting to the next; then I thought that would be too trying for a reader so I shortened the number of pages the reader would have about Character A before moving to Character B. Then I feared that structure would be jumpy. I laid out sections on my floor and moved them around. At one point, I hung a clothesline across my writing room and hung sections by clothespins to see how they’d flow. I needed to know what the experience would be like for the reader—what the reader would know or not know, how the reader would encounter the characters in the various permutations. In the end, you just have to hope what you chose is workable and satisfying. No book can be perfect, or perfect for every reader.

Of the pleasures of this approach is that I enjoy reading a narrative with multiple voices. I like the interplay, the variety of tones and rhythms, the subtext that exists in the spaces between the voices. So being able to create such a narrative was deeply enjoyable. I loved inhabiting the different consciousnesses and being able to use a range of colors and tones.

One of the biggest lessons I try to teach students is how to recognize the intrusion of an omniscient voice into their third person stories and novels—a voice that keeps them from getting or staying close to their point-of-view characters. Do you have any particular advice for getting closer?

One thing is to get rid of your preconceptions about a character and allow the character to speak for herself and reveal herself in gestures and conduct. Or if you can’t get rid of your preconceptions, then at least be aware of them. Too often this sort of distancing occurs when we’re engineering the story and don’t want the characters to mess up our plans by being themselves. So we keep things on the surface where we, the writer, are in charge, even to the detriment of the narrative.

One way to get your characters to reveal themselves is to put them in a scene and listen to them talk and watch their body language. Students and early stage writers often think the only way to get inside a character is by giving his or her interior thinking, which can be done to excess where we hear every thought or internal curse word, when many times the most vivid revelations come by way of gesture: the drumming of fingers on the table, the picking at the food, the moment a character chooses to look out the window instead of answering a ringing phone. With gestures like these, you need only a brief or fleeting interior thought to accompany it—and it says volumes. Then you’re getting closer.

I’m assuming there were some particularly difficult parts to write in the novel, given the presence of addiction, assault, exploding bombs and a devastating affair. Can you talk about how it felt to write these scenes? For instance, did Aaron stop short in his assault not only because he couldn’t go on but because you couldn’t? How much do you think a fiction writer should push herself to tell the ugly truths of people’s thoughts and actions?

I may have the opposite problem about telling ugly truths. I have a hard time illuminating the positive. One of the attractions of writing fiction for me is being able to illuminate the dark stuff, to write about the troubled and problematic. So I don’t have a problem with going there or writing about it, though I do have to watch that the tone is not overbearing for a reader.

Which points to a challenge I need to be aware of, which is to allow my troubled characters to rise above stereotype and their own darkness. For instance, an earlier version of the scene in which Aaron begins to assault the woman went substantially further. But then I realized that Aaron would never go that far; that he wasn’t such a bad kid, just a troubled kid. In writing about Regina, who is an addict, I discovered in the later drafts that the reader didn’t see enough of her other sides, her promise and brilliance, so I had to go back and add those to give a fuller picture. It was still the truth—that’s always the touchstone, you’ve got to write the truth—but I had left out some of the more positive elements in my desire to explore the darkness.

You didn’t mention how it felt to be exploding bombs and seeing people die in the novel. Care to comment?

Yes, there is a scene with a bombing. And it was—you’re correct—hard to write. I labored over those details. I wanted to get across the drama and gravity without making it gratuitously violent. I also needed it to be factually accurate. There was a point during my research when I wondered if the FBI would show up at my door because I was spending so many hours online reading about how to make bombs. And you are correct in flagging these as emotionally difficult scenes. I was sobered, as I was writing, by the enormity of what was taking place. I could see this invented building and garden and lawn in my head, and I could smell the burning.

You mentioned tone and coloration earlier. I find the tone of voice, assertion, and cadence that goes along with Aaron’s third person point of view to be particularly strong in an edgy, unnerving kind of way. Was this on purpose? Did you deliberately try to create different intensities or tones in the points of view? Was anyone’s point of view easier to write than another’s?

Thanks for that comment about Aaron’s voice. I loved writing that voice. His edginess and boldness were purposeful in that this was very clearly who Aaron was: a kid with a lot of issues and a lot of strong feelings, and not a lot of opportunity to express—or vent—earlier in his life. Feeding his voice was also a great deal of the political sentiment fueling the book. Aaron is angry and impatient with what he sees as excessively conciliatory views mouthed by either politicians or naive Americans who he believes don’t grasp the situation in Israel. I’ve heard these sentiments, heard voices like Aaron’s, so it was natural that he’d sound the way he does.

Yona’s was the hardest voice for me to write, the most reticent in terms of revealing herself to me. I think that’s because her story was the most personal. I had a much easier time with the two male characters—Aaron because he’s mouthing a lot of rhetoric, which I loved playing with, and Greenglass because his spiritual struggles were something I liked writing about. There are portions of his interior thinking that come straight out of some of the most beautiful Talmudic and biblical passages, and I loved writing those.

Though the three main characters have distinct sensibilities and yearnings—spiritual, psychological, ideological—which, in turn, lend themselves to different shadings and tones, there were times in the drafts when I had to modify the voices so they wouldn’t sound so similar. For instance, each character has problems with their fathers, and I had to work on that so the narrative wouldn’t be repetitive. As I said earlier, I like novels with multiple voices, but writers have to be careful that the voices have variety. I read Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections twice while working on this novel, mainly for the unplugged voices that carry that book. Those voices gave me permission—again, that word—to unplug my own characters’ voices. I also saw in The Corrections that I knew instantly whose consciousness was behind any given section because the voices were so vivid. Vividness is important. You want your reader to not just know your characters and be interested in their story but to be enlivened by the narration. You want them to be eager to hear those voices ringing off the page.

Curious that you mention characters’ problems with their fathers. The novel is hugely about the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, but do you also want readers to see this novel as ahistorical and about father-child disappointments? Did you intend the novel to weigh so heavily on fathers? From the start were you deliberately reaching for something more personal than political, or did that sort of just come about on its own?

No question that father-child relationships weigh heavily in this book. I didn’t put the father issue in there—just as I didn’t put the Israeli-Palestinian issue in there—but that’s what the characters were about and that’s where they brought me. When I said earlier that I’m one of those writers who doesn’t plan, I’m also one of those who doesn’t know what the themes or complications are going to be until the story is underway, until it’s being written. Once I began to explore Aaron and Greenglass, it was apparent that he had a troubled relationship with his famous novelist father. And once I had Greenglass walk into his parents’ New York living room and look around, I discovered he had a fraught dynamic with his father, too. So the family issues were right there alongside the political ones, and they grew up organically around the characters.

The family stories are as important to me as the political elements. Not surprisingly, they’re also connected. Our personal histories drive our choices, including political choices that may, on the surface, look like they’re based entirely on ideology but in truth are also based on psychology. That is what ultimately emerged while writing the book.

In trying to listen to your characters, what has been the hardest thing about writing fiction for you, if you can focus on just one thing?

Probably the hardest thing has been wanting to know what their story is before they’re ready to tell me. Or, as Ron Carlson put it so well in his book Ron Carlson Writes A Story, before the characters even know the story. Carlson talks about needing to “survive” the writing of the story, meaning needing, as the writer, to just stay there in the room, at the desk, in the chair, and wait. This is the hardest part.

I don’t mean only ignoring the impulse to get up for more coffee or to vacuum the rug or check your email. I mean the impulse to leap at some glimmer of an inkling about the storyline and then rush to create a whole narrative out of it because you can’t stand spending one more minute in the state of not-knowing. Carlson counsels staying close to the details your sentences offer you—someone walks over to a window: great: What does he see? Maybe that will help the narrative unscroll. It’s painstaking. That’s why I think so many writers want to outline. But I’m like Carlson; he says he can’t think his way through it. He has to wait for it to come out in the writing. That’s the hardest part. To sit in the chair and wait.

Aaron’s father churns out popular but melodramatic potboilers about the Holocaust. How did it feel to take on this theme? The novel is also risky in rendering a less than flattering picture of Jewish extremists in the West Bank. Were you worried how that might be taken by Jewish-American readers? As an American Jew yourself, who albeit lives and teaches in Israel for a portion of each year, were you worried about not getting the sensibilities right and being viewed as a literary interloper?

The use of the Holocaust for art is a loaded but important topic. There’s a lot of excellent literature that takes the Holocaust as its subject, for instance, Maus, by Art Spiegelman. But there is also a lot of not such excellent literature on the subject, and I ask myself where the line is, and what makes work exploitative and what makes it okay. I think we have to be careful about writers suddenly finding the Holocaust “rich” or “art-worthy.” I don’t mean to suggest that the only people allowed to touch the Holocaust must be, like Elie Wiesel, survivors. Rather, my concern is with what happens when the events themselves recede into history and become, instead, “mere” subjects to be used by writers interested in them primarily for what they offer in the way of built-in drama. Or, worse, for what they offer writers like Aaron’s father, which is built-in sympathy.

The novel also touches on another use of the Holocaust that is very touchy. And that’s the use of the Holocaust for bolstering Jewish identity. It’s an issue much discussed in Israel,  which carries deep and abiding scars of the Holocaust since so many of its citizens were and are survivors, and where many are saying we need to look at the shadow side of this self-identity. That shadow side is explored in the book through Aaron and his need to see the Palestinians as the new Nazis, i.e., the archetypal enemies of the Jews, and how that colors his thinking and drives his conduct.

As for my portrayal of Jewish extremists on the West Bank, I did worry how American Jewish readers would respond, though I have to admit I loved writing that material. These are ideologues and radicals; they live for their cause and are certain of the rightness of it and use pretty startling rhetoric. Actually, I’ve been fascinated by radicals ever since I was a student in the sixties. Their commitment, their passion, their ability to rationalize violence: who are these people? What allows them to justify what they do? I wanted to find out, so I wrote about them.

Fortunately, my concerns about American Jewish readers turned out to be largely unfounded. American Jews are sophisticated about Israel. They aren’t looking to read another Exodus.

That said, it was imperative that I get the details right and capture the sensibilities, and not come across as some carpetbagger or interloper writing about Israel from an American perch without sufficient insight into the society. I’ve spent a lot of time in Israel in the last decade, either traveling there or teaching there, and I lived there for three years in the late 1970s, but, still, one worries. One of the most gratifying reviews came from an Israeli magazine that said it was hard to tell I wasn’t a native Israeli since I’d gotten the pulse of the country so right. That was enormously meaningful to me.

How do you think your starting to write fiction later than some people might have played into helping you write this novel? You had a career as a lawyer before taking up fiction at the age of 40. Does that experience make a difference? Did you ever feel discounted as a writer, or taken less seriously?

There are a lot of myths out there about writing, including that if you’re a real writer, it’s all you’ve ever wanted to do. And the converse: that if you pursued something else, you’re not the real thing. Then I think of the poet Wallace Stevens, who was a vice-president at an insurance company and apparently enjoyed it, or William Carlos Williams, a doctor. Or Chekhov, for that matter, another doctor. Or Annie Proulx, who first published in her 50s. Some of that myth-making is propagated by the media and our youth-obsessed society, which then seeps into the literary culture. I once got an excruciatingly apologetic email after my story collection came out, asking me for my age, because I was being considered for a prize as an “emerging writer” but the cut-off was something like 39. I was 53.

More disturbing than my own personal encounter with these myths is what it says about our society. It takes time to develop one’s craft and to find one’s voice. Not everyone is going to start doing that at age 22 or 25; not everyone has the financial luxury or life conditions at a relatively young age to allow them to spend years honing their craft either on their own or through continued schooling. This was put forth most trenchantly by the brilliant writer Tillie Olsen in her 1978 bookSilences , where she talked about why there are so few women’s voices in the literary canon, along with other voices at the bottom of the economic ladder. Which was where Olsen lived and struggled. Her fiction is extraordinary—her novella Tell Me A Riddle is deservedly a classic—but her output was small. Her life did not readily yield up the conditions for writing. This had nothing to do with her talent, her commitment, or her drive, and everything to do with the realities of her situation.

We all have situations we have to work with and around in order to do our writing. Economic pressures, family needs, illness, psychological hurdles, even—dare I say it?—other interests. Grace Paley was a political activist all her life and said that writing short stories and poetry, versus novels, suited her because it allowed for that. Piling on myths to make us further question our commitment or ability or talent is not helpful.

As to whether starting to write fiction later than some (most?) helped me write this novel, I don’t know. But I sometimes joke that one of the plusses of starting when I did is that, during the long years before I published anything, I didn’t have my parents looking over my shoulder and telling me to give up and go to law school already. Because I’d already done that.

Would it be fair to say that once you’re on the promotion road, nobody much cares about how old (or young) you are? What has been your experience in promoting Wherever You Go? Do you have advice for fiction writers, who nowadays realize that promotion is part of the job?

I know many writers dread or, at best, approach the promotional side of things with the same enthusiasm one reserves for a root canal, but there have been numerous unexpected pleasures for me associated with these efforts. Actually, the age factor has been one of them. Audiences at book talks tell me they find my relatively late foray into fiction inspiring, or at least interesting. People want to hear about risk-taking.

Overall, I’ve found the promotion to have a lot of upsides. One has been experiencing the generosity of other writers, who’ve put me in touch with reviewers or invited me to author events or, like you, hosted me at their campuses. It’s also been uplifting to meet so many readers. I gave more than a hundred book talks in the year after Wherever You Go was published, and though we wring our hands saying nobody is reading serious fiction,  that hasn’t been my experience. I’ve also discovered the vast world of book bloggers, people who read and write about books not for pay or professional advancement but out of the sheer love of reading. Which is pretty amazing. They’ve been very generous in their response to Wherever You Go, posting thoughtful and often wonderfully written reviews, many saying the subject matter was entirely new to them. All of this has been tremendously heartening and one way to combat the sometimes punishing toll that publishing can take on one’s spirit, where you’re at the mercy of critics or your book is ignored in the press or an Amazon reviewer has been mean to you or you’re enduring any number of the myriad ups and downs that exposure can bring.

I think fiction writers need to adjust their expectations about what their publisher can and cannot do in the way of promotion, and then decide how much they want to take on for themselves. Time spent on promotion—and it takes time, no question—is time not spent writing fiction; on the other hand, if you devote five or seven years to writing a novel, you may decide it’s worth devoting one more to getting the word out so that readers who’d be interested in your book will hear about it. I also think many of us suffer from a romanticized notion of what publishers used to do for writers back in the day. In fact, not every writer was sent on “the book tour,” and often those tours were terrible—near empty bookstores, inappropriate venues. Because of the Internet and the shift to a greater egalitarianism in the reviewing world, there are now many more opportunities for writers to get their work out there than there used to be. Rather than bemoaning a somewhat mythical past, I say we should seize the bull by the horns and be glad for such robust online activity around writing and literature and books.

Dare I ask, what do you suppose the bloggers will be blogging about for your next book? Can you tell us a little about it?

I’ve got a very early stage novel underway set in central Massachusetts about late middle-aged people who leave their conventional lives, where they did all the “right” things, to form a commune with the goal of making their lives truly their own before it’s all over. Talk about the psychological driving your choices. I’m 61 years old. This is much on my mind.

In closing, can you speak specifically to what you had in mind in calling this novel Wherever You Go? As you set out to write a new novel, do you suppose you are seeking to take us to the same “place”? What do you think we as writers and readers need or want to find, wherever we go?

The title comes from a famous passage in the biblical Book of Ruth in which Ruth, the Moabite, pledges allegiance to her mother-in-law Naomi after the men who bound them together have all died: “Wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people will be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.” It’s a poetic passage that invokes loyalty—to a person, a land, and a God. Which is, of course, one of the main themes explored in the book, the idea of committing oneself to a particular land and a particular vision of God’s plan, whatever the cost. I wanted to hint at the underside of that unconditional loyalty, suggest there’s a steep price to be paid for such fealty.

But, as you imply in your question, “wherever you go” has many meanings. This is a story about expatriates and individuals seeking to reinvent themselves in a new place, who take their baggage—literal and metaphorical—with them wherever they go. The question of how much your past drives your present is also one that the book wrestles with, the tension between the old and the new.

Until you posed this question, I hadn’t thought about the phrase “wherever you go” relating to what a fiction writer does for a reader, by being a kind of guide or, perhaps more aptly, a siren, luring them to go where we want them to go, asking them to accompany us on a journey. There is definitely something to that in the pact we make as writers with readers: I’m going to tell you the truth, but it will be through the means of invention. This requires that we as writers have to earn the reader’s trust and cooperation. We have to write with authority—get the details right, stay true to the characters, use all our powers of observation so that we illuminate the human condition with honesty and insight and compassion. This is the reader’s right. All of us— readers and writers—should settle for no less.

Further Links and Resources

“What a bitch of a thing prose is!” Gustave Flaubert wrote in a letter to his lover Louise Colet in 1852. “It’s never finished; there’s always something to redo. Yet I think one can give it the consistency of verse. A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”¹

For nearly a year, Flaubert—“M’sieu Gustave,” to his valet Narcisse, napping under that bell-pull in Croisset—had been hard at work on a novel that would, upon its serial publication in the autumn of 1856 in the journal La Revue de Paris, ignite a firestorm of moral indignation, eventually landing Flaubert (and editor Laurent-Pichat, along with the journal’s printer, Auguste Pillet) in a Paris courtroom, charged with endangering public morality. That novel, Madame Bovary (this essay refers to the Lydia Davis translation, Viking 2010), would become the first masterpiece of so-called “realist” fiction—a label Flaubert himself resisted—in which the author essentially disappears behind what Flaubert called a smooth wall of apparently impersonal prose.

Emma Bovary, the novel’s putative heroine—or anti-heroine, depending upon one’s sympathies—seduced as much by her own romantic illusions as she is by the callow, calculating Rodolphe Boulanger, strolls arm-in-arm with the reader to the very edge of the abyss, and then over that abyss. Without authorial judgment, without moralizing, in meticulously, beautifully turned prose, Flaubert vividly describes her fall.  “Novelists,” writes the critic James Wood, “should thank Flaubert the way poets thank spring: it all begins again with him.” But in 1857, few were thanking Flaubert, least of all Ernest Pinard, the imperial prosecutor who sought to have Madame Bovary banned:

“Who in this book can condemn this woman?” Pinard argued, readily answering himself: “No one.” Admirable though the book was, at least in terms of Flaubert’s considerable artistic talent, Pinard pronounced the author’s apparent lack of morality “execrable,” declaring: “Monsieur Flaubert can embellish his paintings with all the resources of art but with none of its caution; there is in this work no gauze, no veils—it shows nature in the raw.”

And how exactly did Flaubert go about his dangerous art in Madame Bovary? What does “nature in the raw” even look like, as far as fiction is concerned? Take this passage, fairly early in the novel, in which Emma and her husband Charles are invited to a ball at the opulent château of the Marquis d’Andervilliers, in La Vaubyessard:

It was very lofty, paved with marble flagstones, and the sounds of footsteps and voices echoed through it as in a church. Opposite rose a straight staircase, and to the left a gallery that looked out on the garden led to the billiards room, from which one could hear, at the door, the caroming of the ivory balls. As she was passing through it on her way to the drawing room, Emma saw men with serious faces standing around the game, their chins resting on their high cravats, all of them decorated, smiling silently as they made their shots. Against the dark woodwork of the wainscoting, large gilded frames bore, along their lower edges, names written in black letters. She read: “Jean-Antoine d’Andervilliers d’Yverbonville, Comte de La Vaubyessard and Baron de La Fresnaye, killed at the Battle of Coutras, October 20, 1587.” And on another : “Jean-Antoine-Henry-Guy d’Andervilliers de La Vaubyessard, Admiral of France and Knight of the Order of Saint Michael, wounded in combat at La Hougue-Saint-Vaast, May 29, 1692, died at La Vaubyessard, January 23, 1693.” Then one could barely make out those that came after, because the light from the lamps, directed down onto the green cloth of the billiards table, left the room floating in shadow. Burnishing the horizontal canvases, it broke over them in fine crests, following the cracks in the varnish; and from all those great black squares bordered in gold there would emerge, here and there, some lighter part of the paint, a pale forehead, a pair of eyes looking at you, wigs uncoiling over the powdery shoulders of red coats, or the buckle of a garter high on a plump calf.

Here we have the subtlest of seductions, without gauze or veils. To Emma, through whose eyes we witness this scene, and into whom Flaubert has all but vanished, it is all so romantic, so beguiling. The lofty entrance hall, echoing like a church, and those serious, smiling, “decorated” men standing around the green-clothed billiards table, making their shots. And of course the decorated men hanging on the wall, the noble dead, burnished in their martial (and one suspects amorous) triumphs by the light from the lamps hanging over the billiards table. This is Flaubert at his soft-pedaled best, “present everywhere and visible nowhere,” as he famously put it in a letter in 1852, allowing each deliberately chosen detail to speak for itself, without comment. Where once these decorated men might have hacked at each other with swords, thus earning themselves some measure of glory (an attenuated, rather silly glory, we can almost hear Flaubert murmuring), now they can only knock little ivory balls around a billiards table. Later, as dawn approaches, with the music of the dance “still humming in her ears,” Emma stands looking up at the windows of the château, imagining the guests in their rooms. “She would have liked to know what their lives were like, to enter into them, to become part of them.” Windows, one soon finds, are a returning motif in Madame Bovary; and no wonder, since the novel is itself a window, clear as glass, into Emma Bovary’s soul.

It was this very idea of fiction as a crystal clear window that Pinard was railing against. By what moral compass was the reader to navigate the world illuminated by this novel and its “execrable” creator? Up until the publication of Madame Bovary, authors were more than happy to be that compass. But not Flaubert, apparently. Pinard was not only arguing against this one novel but against the extraordinary vanishing act Flaubert had performed. This is the spring Flaubert in no small way ushered in. This is his gift to us.

*

But had Flaubert really disappeared? How exactly can an author be both, as Flaubert himself put it, present everywhere and visible nowhere in fiction?

In How Fiction Works, James Wood counters the occasionally heard criticism that realism, as form, is not really so realistic after all, contriving as it does to compose what is and always has been a rather messy world into a daisy-chain of scenes which invariably (one hopes) build, through conflict and rising action, to a moment of epiphany or change. “Realism, seen broadly as truthfulness to the way things are, cannot be mere verisimilitude, cannot be mere lifelikeness, or life-sameness, but what I must call lifeness: life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry.” In other words, the author hasn’t simply become a camera, mindlessly clicking on one image after another.  The author is still and always with us, quietly, deliberately pointing the way. It’s helpful to remember that Flaubert was wary of being labeled a realist, and rightfully so. Perhaps it is better to imagine him at Croisset, at the window of his second-floor study with its big white bearskin rug and green-clothed writing table and gilded Buddha, and yes, even that little porcelain frog inkwell, looking out past the tulip tree and yew hedges to the Seine. “I have sketched, botched, slogged, groped,” Flaubert had written with no small amount of frustration in 1852. “Oh, what a rascally thing style is. I don’t believe you have any idea what kind of book this one is. I’m trying to be as buttoned-up in it as I was unbuttoned in the others and to follow a geometrically straight line. No lyricism, no reflections, the personality of the author absent.” Absent but nonetheless present everywhere, like God and the Devil, in the details.

And this is precisely how Flaubert could be both present and nowhere at once in that billiards room with Emma Bovary—in the very details he’s given us. Again, these details aren’t merely photographic; they’re not a simple accretion of seemingly random props present only to fill a scene: footsteps and voices in a marble-flagged entrance hall, a billiards table, the light-burnished portraits fading into shadow. I’m talking about fiction at its best now, fiction which is artistically capable of keeping any number of plates spinning in the air. In Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and in much of the finest literature that has followed, from Chekhov to Babel, Welty to Bellows to Munro, those details we encounter in scene are details the author has scrupulously and deliberately chosen (or instinctively, blessedly stumbled upon) that go beyond the mere surface of things. Yes, they paint a vivid scene, often beautifully, but look a little closer and you’ll discover that the solid ground you’re standing on is in fact ice. And under that ice, in the dim green light, another story is being told.

Take this marvelous passage from John Banville’s novel, The Infinities, in which young Adam Godley is waiting for a train to deliver a somewhat unwelcomed guest:

He stands on the platform in the shade. Why is it, he wonders, that railway tracks always give off a smell of kitchen gas? He looks about. Nothing has changed here since he was a child, so far as he can see. The metal canopy overhead is painted yellow and edged with a wrought-iron filigree and must have been put up a century ago or more. The station is lovingly kept. There are pots of geraniums on the window-sills of the waiting room, the benches set at intervals along the platform are freshly varnished, and on the wall a stylised hand pointing the way to the lavatories is painted in bright-red lacquer with a shiny, thick black outline. But where is the station master, where is the cross-eyed porter with the black hoop thing that porters carry on their shoulders, who used to be a fixture of the place? The emptiness is eerie. He paces for a while, then sits down on one of the benches; the new varnish with the sun on it is hot and gummy to the touch. Beyond the tracks the grass is sere and ticks faintly in the heat. Beyond that again the broad reach of the river is a whitish-blue drift throwing off fish-scales of platinum light. The silence buzzes. Down on the track a ragged grey crow hops jerkily from sleeper to sleeper, looking for something, does not find it, gives a disgruntled croak and flaps away. The surge of heedless happiness that rose in him as he drove along the lanes has all subsided now. He has shattered the sunlit surface of the day, like a clumsy gardener putting his foot through a vegetable frame to the humid tangle of things beneath. He gets up from the bench and paces anew, more agitatedly this time.

Notice how quietly Banville introduces a note of unease into this sunlit idyll with that rotten-egg “smell of kitchen gas.” It’s a lovely detail, unexpected and strange, and delicately rich with menace. Immediately Adam looks around, as if knocked slightly off balance, and sees everything is as it should be, as it’s always been, “so far as he can see.” In other words, the visible surface of the morning is still intact. The old iron-edged roof, the pots of geraniums and varnished benches, that painted hand pointing to the bathrooms. But where is everyone? Unnerved, Adam paces, then sits on one of the sticky benches to wait. The dead grass “ticks in the heat”—another marvelous, sly tightening of the screw of disquiet, as is the ragged crow down on the tracks, “looking for something” it does not find. A shift has occurred, as surely as if a cloud had crossed over the sun. “The surge of heedless happiness that rose in him as he drove along the lanes has all subsided now. He has shattered the sunlight surface of the day…” and abruptly gets up to pace again, “more agitatedly this time.”

With its rigorous, poetic attention to rhythm and sound, it’s a passage one could well imagine James Joyce or even Flaubert writing, and yet Banville’s book was published in 2010. Call it what you will—realism or lifeness, or simply the artist quietly, attentively at work, whispering in our ear: we are there with Adam, waiting uneasily on that hot, sun-beaten platform, with the faint smell of kitchen gas in the shimmering air and the dry grass ticking beyond the tracks.

Another example of this attentiveness to telling detail is Pat Barker’s deeply affecting 1995 novel, The Ghost Road, in which we witness the death of the British poet Wilfred Owen, who was killed in the final months of the First World War while trying to cross a canal under machine gun fire. Here, only moments after the battle, we come upon the terrible scene:

On the edge of the canal the Manchesters lie, eyes still open, limbs not yet decently arranged, for the stretcher-bearers have departed with the last of the wounded, and the dead are left alone. The battle has withdrawn from them; the bridge they succeeded in building was destroyed by a single shell. Further down the canal another and more successful crossing is being attempted, but the cries and shouts come faintly here.

The sun has risen. The first shaft strikes the water and creeps toward them along the bank, discovering here the back of a hand, there the side of a neck, lending a rosy glow to skin from which the blood has fled, and then, finding nothing here that can respond to it, the shaft of light passes over them and begins to probe the distant fields.

It is a scene Barker renders with both pathos and restraint, with this image of the dead sprawled along the canal after the storm has passed, their “limbs not yet decently arranged.” These young men have quite literally been left behind, not only by the battle still raging in the distance but by time itself. Already, one senses, the world is moving on. The rising sun, creeping near, discovers them, just as we have discovered them. Briefly, in that rosy glow that rises on the hands and necks and faces of these young men who in death have suddenly ceased to be themselves and are now simply the scattered, anonymous dead—in this glow we see the last flickering echo of life. The shaft of sunlight lingers on them, just as our eye might for a moment linger over a black-and-white war photograph in a book, before turning to the next page. It is not only Wilfred Owen then who has been effaced here by this Flaubertian-smooth wall of apparently impersonal prose. Barker too has vanished, or at least faded, right before our eyes.

*

Within a year of Flaubert’s death in 1879, Croisset was gone. The white-walled villa where he had written Madame Bovary, which for decades had served Flaubert so well as an island of domestic tranquility and peace, was sold to a consortium of investors and promptly gutted to the rafters. In its place they erected an enormous red-brick distillery, to which barges regularly delivered loads of coal and grain, docking down by the water’s edge. Where once eel fisherman had cast their nets, now a huge factory pipe poured an endless stream of reeking white foamy runoff into the river, while tall brick stacks, lit by the ugly light of softly hissing gas lanterns, spewed smoke into the air round the clock. Gone was the garden with its flower beds and yew hedges and glorious tulip tree, where M’sieu Gustave, when he was not laboring away at his desk upstairs, was often seen by the neighborhood children lounging on sunny afternoons, contentedly smoking his pipe. Years later, one of those children, now grown to adulthood, remembered that time at Croisset:

For me, he was a being like no other, exotic and fantastic, a mysterious personality whom I regarded in a confusion of wonder and respect. I never believed he was Norman. He was Persian or Turkish, Chinese or Hindu, I couldn’t decide which, but for sure he came from some distant place and had a distinctive nature. The fabulous accoutrements made me think he might well be a prince… When my nanny wanted to treat me, she’d walk me past his front gate, where I’d gaze at him smoking his pipe, slouched in a large armchair. I’ll always remember with tender emotion his pink and white striped culottes and his house robes, the floral design of which were pure poetry.

In life and in fiction, detail is everything.

*

From his study earlier, Flaubert had watched his greyhound Julio swim out to greet the boatman paddling past. A glittering golden-silver thread sketched itself on the brown river behind the dog as the slow current carried them along, and where the boatman’s oars dashed the water’s calm surface, the sunlight seemed to shatter like little glass globes. Standing there in his flowered Bokharan robe, a gift from his good friend Turgenev, with the mess of his great, unruly manuscript behind him on the green-clothed table—Bouvard et Pécuchet, on which he had labored now for three long years and saw no end to—Flaubert had felt the bones in his right hand throbbing, a deep smoldering ache that, along with the rheumatism in his knees and the pain in his swollen feet, rarely went away these days. Along with the pills Flaubert took for epilepsy and gout and his wretched, rotting teeth, his physician Fortin had prescribed a daily walk, but it was the garden with its weedy flower beds that had finally drawn him away from his writing this afternoon. Crouching painfully now, he pulled clump after clump of spiky dandelion. If only old Narcisse were here to help. But Narcisse, half blind with age, had returned to the bosom of his family years ago. Gone too was Flaubert’s mother, buried in Rouen, and Uncle Parain, and dear Liline, along with her English governess. A bumble bee, emerging from the soft purple throat of a lily, its black legs furred with pollen, lit for a second on the long sleeve of his robe, circled the bright red embroidered flower there, then buzzed away. Asleep on the warm flagstones, Julio’s paws twitched, a little ripple flowing up and down the muscles of his slender legs. The greyhound was dreaming, but of what? That boatman perhaps, his round red face, the oars creaking on the gunnels. What a little fool you are! Go back! Swim home before you drown! The long sun-emblazoned thread unfurling behind Julio as he swam toward shore. His beating heart.

Further Links & Resources

“Prolix! Prolix! There’s nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix.”

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
“We Call Upon the Author to Explain”

I thought about using a more purely literary quote for this essay—Elmore Leonard’s “Skip the boring parts”—but that’s an oversimplification, and I want to speak against oversimplification. (Besides, Nick Cave is a terrific writer with two novels under his belt, and his album notes look and read like chapbooks; he deserves to be quoted by writerly types more often.) Fiction writers are admonished to cut, cut, cut at least as many times as we are urged to write every day. And while it is generally sound advice, it is also terribly easy to misapply.

Thousands of pieces of fiction annually grow stronger by cutting, but those aren’t the ones I worry about. I’m concerned for those that have the life and soul torn out of them because the scissors of concision are wielded with no apparent purpose other than cutting for its own sake. A lot of this kind of cutting happens in response to critique from workshop leaders or peers who have seen other pieces improve through cutting, and who pass on the well-intentioned dictum without thinking, as if it applies to all pieces at all times.

Which is, of course, untrue. Six-line prose poems have turned into eight-page short stories. Novellas have bloomed into trilogies. Novels have gone from 280 pages to 320 pages and gotten better, not worse. Sometimes pieces get bigger not because they become bloated with needless words, but because they tell more story, and sometimes more is exactly what a work needs. In the interest of making a work “tighter” we often reach for the scissors because we’ve been instructed to cut, cut, cut. Telling more story in the same number of pages can also achieve the tightness we desire, perhaps to better effect. We tend to confuse brevity with tautness, though plenty of work—especially today, with the ubiquity of abstract, absurdist flash fiction—is guilty of having so little story that it can’t become taut no matter how stripped down it is.

In the worst-case scenario, premature cutting for its own sake doesn’t serve the tale, and it can even cause a tale to die before it has a chance to blossom. I don’t know how many works of fiction die annually from such premature cutting, but I do know that writers who teach or critique their fellow writers need to encourage the responsible use of scissors for a specific purpose. Scissors need to serve a controlling idea, and if that controlling idea is absent, then tightness is merely an attempt to write like somebody else (frequently Raymond Carver or, in the case of abstract, absurdist flash fiction, Donald Barthelme).

One way to look at the scissors question is through the figure of the narrator, which we can talk about regardless of whether a work is in first, second, or third person. I know that I’m in the minority in speaking of narrators when discussing third-person point of view, since some writers only acknowledge its existence in first person. But all tales have tellers, and these tellers vary from story to story and book to book; if they didn’t, all work by a particular writer would sound the same across the board, or be determined by the vagaries of mood and circumstance. If narrators don’t exist in third person POV, then how can we accommodate books that follow multiple characters in close third person, such as Tom Perrotta’s Little Children, or blend close third person with first person, such as Margot Livesey’s The House on Fortune Street?

Narrators exist across the spectrum of fiction, and plenty of people use more than one narrator in a single work. These multiple narrative personae notice different things, and they represent the psyches of the characters they follow in different ways. They serve as periscopes looking into the author’s fictive world, and as the interface between the author and the reader. Narrators guide our attention, and they can change considerably as authors move from draft to draft. They are what changes first—a small loosening of diction, a hint of more or less desperation, an increased willingness to let characters suffer for their wrongs—when authors want to chart new pathways through their fictive worlds that are more elucidating, more suspenseful, more concrete than those in previous drafts.

Narrators, over time, tend to speak their truths more bravely and bring us more directly to the heart of things. As we work through the drafting process, changing lines here and there—and yes, skipping the boring parts—we’re actually arriving at more precise narrative personae that allow us to work with more confidence and render our characters more decisively. How often have you heard a fellow writer say, “I just found a new voice for this draft, and I love how vague and imprecise it is!”? The great joy of working through drafts in fiction is to see sharp focus emerge from blurriness, to hear innuendo-filled dialogue turn into direct personal challenge, to feel murmurs of understanding and desire become actions in the flesh.

This, not concision for its own sake, is what we should aspire to when we take out the scissors and cut our fiction. If we tweak our work only to make it appear more taut—though it never contains more story, and though its truths are never spoken more sharply—then we embrace concision as a mere stylistic ornament. Ultimately I agree with Nick Cave: there’s nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix, as long as we’re wise about how we use them—to serve the work, not some knee-jerk reaction to cut, cut, cut.

Maybe that project on your desk or bookshelf doesn’t need cutting after all. Maybe it needs more of a story to tell, or a bolder narrator to tell it.

Quotes and Notes is a craft essay series by Steven Wingate. His short story collection Wifeshopping won the 2007 Bakeless Prize in fiction from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2008. He is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at South Dakota State University.

The woman is Marina Singh, a researcher in a Minnesota pharmaceutical lab who embarks on a mission to the Amazon. She is dispatched there to recover the details of her coworker’s recent death, and to evaluate the research of a field team deep in the jungle, a team headed up by her former mentor, Dr. Swenson. The checkered relationship between mentor and mentee, between student and teacher, is at the fulcrum of the novel’s central tension.

Deposited in the South American city of Manaus, Marina sets out to track down Dr. Swenson, whose work on developing a controversial new fertility drug suggests a  scientific quest for progress, and the invasion and potential exploitation of the Lakashi, a fictional population indigenous to the Amazon.

As in all odysseys, what particularize Marina’s journey are the hurdles, and how she reacts to them. Speed bumps along the way are also what give a story literary traction, and, as in Bel Canto, Patchett is a master of creating extraordinary circumstances for seemingly ordinary characters.  Marina loses her suitcases, her clothes, reading materials, cell phone, and ties to the outside. Once in Manaus, she must endure numerous tests of will in order to find Dr. Swenson’s whereabouts, including scorching heat and a debilitating fever. Divested of her creature comforts, we see her at a vulnerable state and one that is ripe for transformation.

Throughout, Marina is plagued with nightmares—a reaction to the anti-malaria drug Lariam—and these nightly rebellions of the psyche provide a recurring connotative trope:

Even if she went home tomorrow she would have to take it for another four weeks. It was the drug’s way of reminding the patient that the trip isn’t over. The trip would be in the blood stream, in the tissues.  All the potential disasters of the place would continue to linger inside.

The persistence of the drug’s nightmarish side effects raises questions about what exactly medicine does, if the supposed “therapy” spawns new, harder-to-cure maladies (in this case, nightmares). Conversely, Marina ingests a shaman’s cup of river liquid to bring down a near-fatal fever, and after a delirious, death-like trance, is pretty much healed. This paradox of modernization versus preservation recurs throughout the novel.

The Lariam also acts as a metaphoric stand-in for how journeys linger in your blood, even after the trip is over, as a psychological breeding ground for illness or health. The idea that a place could live inside you, ripe with disaster or amelioration, internalizes the external arc of the story, layering conflict upon conflict. Good stories, too, are likely to linger, as this one does, even after the act of reading them has ended.

In the tradition of Heart of Darkness, State of Wonder proves the delineation between civilization and jungle is a murky one. Once among the Lakashi, Marina and Dr. Swenson face medical challenges and ethical choices about the boundaries of science and its rippling implications. As Dr. Swanson sums up, their work is a slippery slope between progress and dependency:

What happens to the girl whose brother cuts her after I’ve gone? Does the tribe still have faith in the man who sewed up heads before me? Has he kept up his own skills or was he too busy watching mine? I don’t intend to be here forever…

Through the formidable Dr. Swenson, Patchett challenges the assumption that progress be defined through academic or capitalistic objectives: Is a hot pharmaceutical commodity worth the human price exacted for its potential distribution? Is scientific innovation worth taking down an entire self-sustaining society? In posing questions such as these, State of Wonder cautions against easy answers.

One explanation offered between the jungle and civilization is the existence of art. Before trekking to the jungle, Marina comes to see the Manaus opera house as a kind of sacred space:

There was no real explanation for how such a building was conceived for such a place. Marina thought of it as the line of civilization that held the jungle back. Surely without the opera house the vines would have crept up over the city and swallowed it whole.

One would hope after having lived with the Lakashi, Marina’s definition of civilization and the jungle’s menacing reach of influence would surely be more measured and less imperialistic. However, the idea that art is what creates a society or separates civilization from savagery is notable:

In these past few days of fever, Marina had forgotten herself. The city was breaking her down along with the Lariam, her sense of failure, her nearly mad desire to be home in time to see the lilacs. But then the orchestra struck a note that brought her back to herself. Every pass of the cellists’ bows across the cellos’ strings scraped away a bit of her confusion, and the woodwinds returned her to strength. While she sat in the dark, Marina started to think that this opera house, and indeed this opera, were meant to save her.

Words and sentences, then, like bows and strings, can bring us back to ourselves. The act of reading is an act of salvation; narrative and expression are lifeboats on a meandering river.

Patchett’s magic is in weaving these details so effortlessly that they never register as constructed. Her use of language and voice; the development of a wide range of characters who differ in race, age, and gender; and the elements of mystery and suspense all contribute to a bona fide page turner, an adventure story that still rests comfortably on the shelf of Literary Fiction.

Her gift for capturing emotional nuance registers throughout, as in these two (of many possible!) examples:

At that moment she understood why people say You may want to sit down. There was inside her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding, as if she were an extension ruler and her ankles and knees and hips wee all being brought together at closer angles.

There was no one clear point of loss. It happened over and over again in a thousand small ways and the only truth there was to learn was that there was no getting used to it.

The character’s modest physical collapse and the thousand small pin-pricks of loss both register with instant clarity—the universality of the feeling is rendered in such a concise, precise way, that you wonder why nobody thought to express it as such before.

Great authors can infuse a physical setting with the emotional undercurrents of their story. State of Wonder, drawing from its “exotic” locale, capitalizes on this notion that the perception of our surroundings is inflected by our emotional state. A figure undergoing transformation, then, sees the strange as familiar, the familiar as strange:

Beyond the spectrum of darkness she saw the bright stars scattered across the table of the night sky and felt as if she had never seen such things as stars before. She did not know enough numbers to count them, and even if she did, the stars could not be separated one from the other, the whole was so much greater than the sum of its parts. She saw the textbook of constellations, the heroes of mythology posing on fields of ink. She could see the milkiness in everything now, the way the sky was spread over with light.

This de-familiarization is crucial to convey the change necessary for all protagonists – the idea that a truly powerful experience upends the very definition of what we think we know. Everything, down to “such things as stars” must be redefined. Old expectations are washed clean, and we’re left with something new and dangerous and beautiful.

The title is never fully explained, but we can infer that this state of wonder is in part a reference to the magical qualities of the jungle and its inhabitants. In addition, the concrete noun “state/statehood” mixed with the dreamy uncertainty of “wonder” offers a useful dichotomy for Marina’s predicament. She is a doctor, a scientist, but, inserted into the jungle, she possesses a child’s capacity for awe and terror:

She had had a good imagination as a child, though it had been systematically chipped apart by years of studying inorganic chemistry and charting lipids. These days Marina put her faith in data, the world she trusted was one that she could measure. But even with a truly magnificent imagination she could not have put herself in the jungle. She felt something slip across her rib cage—an insect? A bead of sweat? She kept still, looking out through the top of the hammock at the bright split of daylight in front of her… she excelled not through bright bursts of imagination but by the hard labor of a field horse pulling a plow.

Reading (or writing) a book is itself a kind of odyssey. Most writers would tell you the bulk of their work is not all bright bursts of inspiration and light, but something closer to excavation. You go down to find something, to suss something out, and you come back changed, different than you were before. It is more plow pulling and less harvest. But what is lovely about this particular paragraph, and, indeed, Patchett’s latest novel, is that, in a different setting, the everyday mechanics of charting lipids and a putting your faith in data take on a larger significance, their own poetic magnitude. A lab in the Amazon is not the same as a lab in Minnesota. The charts and studies come to carry their own sacred connotations, so much so, that even when you yourself have returned to the original state, the journey is still with you.  Perhaps by being dropped down into an entirely new environment, some of our chipped-away astonishment can be restored.

As readers, we allow ourselves to be transformed by the spell a good book casts, and, if we’re lucky, that spell puts us in a state of—yes—wonder.

Further Links and Resources

How refreshing, then, to read a novel like Jo Ann Beard’s In Zanesville, which she describes in interviews as written for a younger audience, but whose broad appeal transcends both gender and age. Indeed, short of Beard’s interviews, nothing about this book suggests it isn’t marketed for adults. Like the rare kid in school who is popular with all the cliques, In Zanesville can hang comfortably with anybody: the story perfectly captures the tenor of early high school without ever condescending to its characters or isolating its readers.

For one thing, the unnamed narrator is hilarious. Never cutesy or precocious, her dry wit and off-hand observations compliment a lyrical and authentic vulnerability. Her best friend Felicia (Flea) is – to borrow a term from Charles Baxter – an ideal counterpoint character. Their friendship is a reminder why everyone needs a war buddy in the trenches of high school. Whether negotiating the politics of a cheerleader sleepover, deserting marching band mid-parade, or cutting deals with God in order to effectively sneak out of her house, the plucky protagonist’s voice is sharp as a tack. And though the material is beautifully age-specific (the bananas-and-mayo diner orders, the atrocity of Mom bras), the implications of time and place are significant and far-reaching.

Set in a small Illinois factory town—perched between the rural obscurity of corn fields and the glittering architecture of Chicago, the landscape mirrors that in-between feeling the narrator experiences so acutely.

In addition, the tightness of Beard’s prose undercuts any potential sentimentality of her subject matter. The opening and closing sentences of this novel struck me as the best opening and closing lines I’ve read in recent memory (the first and last scenes both take place around fire, a lovely symmetry). Each chapter starts and ends with killer one-liners. The same is true before and after the white space within chapters. This book, on top of everything else, is a craft lesson in precise, elegant compactness.

Beard, whose gorgeous and heartbreaking The Boys of My Youth also bridged a literary canyon—that between short stories and memoir—clearly understands that good writing tells the truth through whatever medium the narrative demands. And like a good friend, her work stays with you as you age, taking on new meaning and reminding you of earlier selves with each new stage of life.

Further Links and Resources

In the introduction to his recent interview with McMahon, J. Caleb Winters describes the subject of this new novel. He writes:

In Tyler McMahon’s debut novel, How the Mistakes Were Made, Laura Loss comes of age in the 1980s hardcore punk scene, the jailbait bassist in her brother Anthony’s band. While on a reluctant tour through Montana, Laura meets Sean and Nathan, two talented young musicians dying to leave their small mountain town. With these two men, Laura forms the Mistakes, and at the height of their fame, the volatile bonds between the three explode. Hated by the fans she’s spent her life serving, Laura finally tells her side of how the Mistakes were made.

During their conversation, McMahon recalls the paranoia of Cold War America, shares his own experiences touring with a band, and discusses the influences of this new novel. In response to a question about how the Cold War shaped the book’s protagonist, Punk Rock, and the themes of the novel, McMahon says the following:

All my earliest memories involve being terrified by some sort of nuclear apocalypse. I would have nightmares about it all the time. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and cry about it. So many childhood sleepovers ended with somebody’s older brother or sister whispering about how the bombs worked—if they used keys or buttons, if the president could launch them from his limo, how big they were and what shape they had. There was something on television back then, maybe one of those Amazing Stories bits, in which all the nukes were fired and a little boy runs outside and screams “Stop!” and the missiles all froze in midair. I remember identifying with that at a young age.

For many years, I thought I was just paranoid or a coward. Then one day when I was in my twenties, my father told me a story about a college lecture he attended. I believe they were talking about the Cuban missile crisis. The professor was absolutely certain there would be a nuclear war between the US and the USSR in the next few years. My dad talked about how unsettling that was. After that, I realized it was a symptom of an age, not just my own psychological flaw.

I definitely think the nuclear threat was a significant factor in punk rock’s genesis, and in American hardcore especially. That’s a position I argued for often when I taught my rock history class to undergrads. I’ll concede that it might be too neat of a thesis, as a lot of bad stuff happened to the US in the 80s. But in the case of punk, it rings true.

When I began writing in Laura’s voice, she immediately had this tough, two-fisted, tomboy exterior. It became doubly important to give her some kind of soft underbelly, an inner frailty. The fear of nuclear weapons felt like a good fit. It helped place those flashbacks, both in a specific time and in D.C.

To read J. Caleb Winters’s complete interview with the author, please click here.

• We’re honored to count Tyler McMahon as one of our regular contributors here on Fiction Writers Review, and so it’s a particular pleasure to feature his new novel. For some of his most recent work for us, please read his “Stories We Love” post on Eric Rickstad’s story “Ballerina, Ballerina.”
• You can also read his reviews of Alan Heathcock’s debut collection Volt and Joshua Mohr’s debut novel Some Things That Meant the World to Me.
• Check out Tyler’s website for more information, including upcoming author events.
• You can also win one of three signed copies of this book, which we’ll be giving away next week to three of our Twitter followers.

To be eligible for this giveaway (and all future ones), simply click over to Twitter and “follow” us (@fictionwriters).

To all of you who are already fans, thank you!

To claim your copy of this collection, please email us at the following address:

winners [at] fictionwritersreview.com

If you’d like to be eligible for future giveaways, please visit our Twitter Page and “follow” us!

Jonathan Evison (West of Here, All About Lulu) praised the book, noting that “[w]ith the velocity and conviction and frenetic pace of a punk anthem, McMahon has captured perfectly the life cycle of a rock and roll band in all its exhilarating and destructive glory. How the Mistakes Were Made is fast, furious, and un-put-downable.”

Born and raised in the Washington, DC area, Tyler McMahon studied at the University of Virginia and Boise State University. Before writing his first novel, he worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador, a surf instructor in California, and waiter in Montana. He co-edited the anthologies Surfing’s Greatest Misadventures and Fishing’s Greatest Misadventures for Casagrande Press. He lives in Honolulu with his wife, food writer Dabney Gough, and teaches in the English Department at Hawaii Pacific University. His short stories have been published in the Sycamore Review, the Antioch Review, and the Minnesota Review, among others.

I met Tyler in 2003 while attending Boise State University. In this interview, conducted via email over a span of a few months, we discuss the paranoia of Cold War America, what it’s like going on tour, and how writing can be like church.

Interview

J. Caleb Winters: The 1980s Cold War mentality serves as a backdrop for the flashback chapters in How the Mistakes Were Made.  In one chapter you write, “All holidays are haunted by threat…some older kid always asks out loud if this will be the last year in history.”  Could you describe how the Cold War shaped Laura, Punk Rock, and the themes of the novel?

Tyler McMahon: It’s interesting that you bring that up. I often feel like I avoid early childhood more than the average fiction writer. But that element is one thing that I definitely mined from my own youth.

All my earliest memories involve being terrified by some sort of nuclear apocalypse. I would have nightmares about it all the time. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and cry about it. So many childhood sleepovers ended with somebody’s older brother or sister whispering about how the bombs worked—if they used keys or buttons, if the president could launch them from his limo, how big they were and what shape they had. There was something on television back then, maybe one of those Amazing Stories bits, in which all the nukes were fired and a little boy runs outside and screams “Stop!” and the missiles all froze in midair. I remember identifying with that at a young age.

For many years, I thought I was just paranoid or a coward. Then one day when I was in my twenties, my father told me a story about a college lecture he attended. I believe they were talking about the Cuban missile crisis. The professor was absolutely certain there would be a nuclear war between the US and the USSR in the next few years. My dad talked about how unsettling that was. After that, I realized it was a symptom of an age, not just my own psychological flaw.

I definitely think the nuclear threat was a significant factor in punk rock’s genesis, and in American hardcore especially. That’s a position I argued for often when I taught my rock history class to undergrads. I’ll concede that it might be too neat of a thesis, as a lot of bad stuff happened to the US in the 80s. But in the case of punk, it rings true.

When I began writing in Laura’s voice, she immediately had this tough, two-fisted, tomboy exterior. It became doubly important to give her some kind of soft underbelly, an inner frailty. The fear of nuclear weapons felt like a good fit. It helped place those flashbacks, both in a specific time and in D.C.

Atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Source: National Archives (208-N-43888)

I’ve always felt that adolescence during the Cold War was like adolescence on steroids. It’s hard enough to be a teenager and deal with the difficult realization that the grown-ups don’t know what they’re doing; but when the grown-ups have nuclear weapons aimed at each other…then it’s a whole different ball game.

I try to remind myself that every human generation has feared that it will be the last. I guess there’s always been religious eschatology, but then you usually get an afterlife or something to look forward to. And those sorts of apocalypses are considered inevitable, written into history from creation. With the Cold War, it was all due to human error.

It’s fascinating to talk about this stuff with college freshman nowadays. They’ve grown up in the shadow of 9/11; that’s the Fear Narrative that’s been thrust upon them. A part of me thinks that it’s worse, as it actually happened; it’s not as nebulous as what I grew up with. Another part of me realizes that we survived 9/11, that we could survive another one if we had to. Thermonuclear war was supposed to vaporize all human life in an instant.

I suppose it’s more likely that some sort of fear vacuum is built into our brains, and demands to be filled with four horsemen or bombs or terrorists. Or perhaps that vacuum is drilled into us by whoever profits most from those fears. Whatever the cause, I do think it’s real, and that it affects young people most severely.

How the Mistakes Were Made is getting some excellent reviews from music industry insiders.  Could you explain how you researched your novel?

The seeds got planted when I was a Teaching Assistant in graduate school. I designed a first-year writing and research course themed around the history of rock and roll. At the time, I didn’t see this course as having anything to do with my fiction writing. But as I got deeper into the material, and inundated myself with music history and documentary footage, it blossomed into a minor obsession. This all happened to coincide with a time in which I was struggling to understand the novel as a form, so I may have brought a kind of tunnel vision to the subject matter.

I was blown away by Michael Azerrad’s incredible nonfiction books: Come as You Are, and Our Band Could Be Your Life. The lines that he draws between hardcore punk and Seattle grunge were, in many ways, the impetus for Laura’s character, and my novel as a whole. How the Mistakes Were Made might not exist without Azerrad’s work.

Once I knew the story in a big picture sense, I found myself taking on a whole second wave of research aimed at making the details convincing. Many scenes take place in cities that I’m only vaguely familiar with, so I spent hours pouring over online maps and bus schedules. I also had to include a lot of technical jargon about recording and the music business. (I don’t know how fiction writers did it before the Internet.) Finally, I ended up tagging along with a San Francisco band called Poor Man’s Whiskey on several tours of Northern California, Oregon, and Washington. For weeks, I slept on a bus with five dirty musicians soaking up the lingo and the lifestyle—all in the name of research.

I have to admit: sending the book to actual music figures and industry people still scares the hell out of me. It’s something I never considered while writing it. I feel so fortunate that the feedback has been positive thus far, and that most of those who lived through these scenes find some resonance with their own experiences.

You write so wonderfully about the experience of performing music, you must be an accomplished musician.  Did you play any shows with Poor Man’s Whiskey?

My live show experience with Poor Man’s Whiskey is limited to a single keg party in Hood River, Oregon, in which I sat in on the Green Suitcase—PMW’s satellite percussion section. And that wasn’t the actual band, but rather a one-night side project known as Like a Sturgeon. It was one of the best nights of my life, but didn’t lead to a permanent position in the lineup.

Unfortunately, I’m not much of an accomplished musician. I could play the drums passably well in high school, jammed for many hours in the basement, and played some shows at community centers. That’s where I get most of my first-hand knowledge—the nerves and the exhilaration, the sweating armpits and ringing ears. George, the drummer from PMW, sometimes had me bang on his drums during sound-check. The last time I did that I couldn’t even play a proper beat. It was thoroughly depressing.

With a guitar, I can fake my way through a dozen campfire songs, but I don’t seem to have any real aptitude for that instrument. I’m kind of a musical dabbler, a hobbyist. I don’t know any theory, and I suspect I might be tone-deaf. As a teenager, I was handy with equipment, and used to fix amps and guitars for my friends. I liked to make crude PA systems out of old stereos, that sort of thing. I think I developed an odd fascination with the analog electronics associated with music that helped me write this novel.

I’ve come to believe that my less-than-expert musicianship was actually an asset. The example I often look to is Hunter S. Thompson’s book about the Hell’s Angels. He has one foot in and one foot out of that subculture. He rides motorcycles with the Angels, and speaks the lingo, but he isn’t quite one of the gang. A bit of awe and curiosity can fuel a writer’s interest, and offer a better perspective.

Is there any difference in writing short stories vs. writing a novel?  Do you enjoy one form more than another?

Well, I wouldn’t consider myself an expert in either form, but they’ve definitely been different, in my experience. Learning about novels—from a craft perspective—was an amazing educational experience for me. I’ve been trying to write fiction since I was 18 or 19, and didn’t get serious about novels until my early thirties. So I stumbled upon novel writing as this incredible space for artistic growth, which built on skills I’d been trying to acquire for years beforehand. It was invigorating, like a musician suddenly learning three new chords.

I’ve found it suits my personality better than shorter pieces. I’m a slow, grinding kind of writer. Having a narrator and a premise that I can wake up to and spend time with over the course of years functions like an escape for me. There’s less pressure for innovation or completion. And I seem to be prone to these fleeting obsessions that last about sixteen months—which jives nicely with novel writing.

But I certainly don’t believe that short stories are somehow a primer or first-step for writing novels. Being a short-story writer is a prospect I find terrifying, to be honest. Short fiction is very difficult to master, or even to be competent at. With novels, I feel like I can hide behind the story a little more. The pressure seems to be more on the book than the talent.

I think about this a lot, now that I teach fiction to undergraduates. It saddens me that some students dismiss short stories as obsolete or irrelevant. Almost everything I know about writing comes from short stories—reading them and writing them. I feel very lucky to have been educated in that form, even if I haven’t written one in a while.

You mention you’re a “slow, grinding kind of writer.”  Could you elaborate more on your writing process?

If I had to sum up my process in two words, it would be “not spontaneous.” I like to write in the same time and place everyday, usually not for more than two or three hours at a stretch. I’m easily disheartened, so I try to keep the blank-page process and the self-editing process as separate as possible. I write everything out longhand first, mainly because I find I’m less inhibited on paper than on screen—less inclined to second-guess whatever I put down. I also think there’s an illusion of linear progress with pen and paper that’s harder to maintain with a word processor.

I read an interview with Nick Cave in which he said something along the lines of “I don’t rely on inspiration; it is unreliable. I wake up every morning and I work.” That describes me pretty well. I might scribble down the odd phrase or idea during the rest of the day, but generally I prefer my writing time to be like church: sacred, highly ritualistic, and not too long.

Lately, it’s become important to me to try and enjoy the novels as I’m working on them. Even when it’s difficult, I try to think of the work as a respite or indulgence, a place where I’m not touched by other daily tribulations. That’s harder to do once the writing gets into the hands of others. When I’m responding to feedback from editors or whoever, then it’s different. I work all day, worry a lot, don’t have as much fun. That part feels more like a job.

But I don’t mean to advocate for any particular approach. The more I read about how writers work, the more I realize that everyone writes in a different way. I’m very interested in process, and I always try to make my students conscious of the nuts and bolts of how and when they write.

In one of my favorite passages Laura poses an important question. She asks: “What is it that makes somebody a bad person?  Is it your desires, these feelings that we can barely control? Or is it your actions, which urges you obey or deny?” Could you elaborate more on this idea? Is this something Laura truly believes? Is this something you truly believe?

Certainly, part of the concept of the book is that Laura is an object of public hatred—a Yoko Ono or Courtney Love figure. The novel functions mostly as her defense, but I also wanted her to internalize some of those accusations, and to be introspective about her successes and failures as a human being. She earnestly looks back on the history of The Mistakes, and tries to understand what she might have done differently.

In that passage, I suppose she’s asking whether it’s enough to have a good heart, or if good is as good does. I’m sure the philosophers have more exact terms to describe this conflict.

I don’t think Laura ever completely buys the black-and-white moral compass that the fans hold her to. But she does believe in the effects of acting or not acting. Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that what Laura comes to realize in that scene is that all the desires she acted upon were real and powerful. Her only other option was repression.

I was heavily under the influence of Lolita when I started The Mistakes. Though never as much of a monster as Humbert Humbert, Laura was originally much older than Sean and Nathan. She had terms for boys like them, the way Humbert has ‘nymphets.’ Almost all of that came out in the editorial wash, but those asides she has to the fans and press (of which that passage is one), are completely ripped off from Humbert’s “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury…” lines. (If I remember correctly, many of the names of the fake venues that The Mistakes play are adapted from the hotel names and other things in Lolita.)

I could never pull off a narrator like Humbert. But in a small, watered-down way, I like to think that Laura’s dilemma is somewhat akin to his: the inhibition or expression of a forbidden desire.

Who has influenced you as a writer?

By the far the most enduring influence on me—from the time I first started writing stories—is Denis Johnson. His work is something I still return to often, and have never gotten over. Mark Richard’s fiction was extremely important to me as a young writer, especially Fishboy, and Ice at the Bottom of the World. He’s still one of the most original and unique writers I can think of.

Before I got serious about writing, Hemingway and Steinbeck particularly moved me. I’ve always had a fondness for expat novels, for some reason.

A strange and wonderful novel called Straight Through the Night by Edward Allen came into my life at a very formative stage. The scene in The Mistakes when Laura burns a one-dollar bill is my homage to that amazing book.

More recently—especially since I started focusing on writing novels—I’ve felt a strong affinity for Russell Banks. In a weird way, I feel like I’ve spent the last few years working in a style that emulates his. The verisimilitude and the timbre of the prose in The Mistakes seem to aspire towards his style, more than anyone else’s—at least to my mind. I say it’s weird because I don’t remember ever making that decision. It’s more like a space that I happened to be comfortable working in.

Lately there has been a lot of press about M.F.A. programs and much of it is negative.  How would you describe your experience at Boise State University’s M.F.A program?  Do you think any of the criticisms about M.F.A. programs are valid?  Do they just crank out “cookie cutter” writers?

My experience at BSU was somewhat typical and somewhat unique. Certainly, the classes, the demographic of students, the teaching load, the readings and parties and stuff—were all industry standard. But BSU was a small, young program then. We certainly never had access to agents or people in publishing or whatnot—beyond the level of the small press or literary journal. Maybe that’s not so unusual, but I bring it up to emphasize that it was a craft-based environment. I learned a lot as a graduate student, more than I expected to. I don’t believe I could’ve written The Mistakes without the skills I got there. Frankly, even if I was independently wealthy and could spend ten years reading and writing in a cabin by myself—I still don’t believe I’d have learned as much.

I’ve largely stayed on the sidelines during the recent kerfuffle over MFA programs. I haven’t read The Program Era, though I did read some interviews with the author and found his insights to be interesting and balanced. I thought the NYC/MFA article also was full of good points and several brilliant observations. In general, I think Creative Writing programs have become old enough and big enough that they should expect to be questioned in a serious way.

But I don’t have much patience for critics who condemn MFA programs based on a few books they didn’t enjoy. That’s a practice I find deeply flawed. Anyone who’s thinking about the author’s grad program while reading a novel should reconsider his or her approach to reading fiction. With all their assistantships and fellowships, writing programs form perhaps the most effective patronage system that we have for emerging literature in this country. So I think it’s misleading to frame it as a purely aesthetic issue.

Frankly, I’m not sure the cookie-cutter accusation holds up against any real scrutiny. The last two books by graduates of my program are Alan Heathcock’s and my own. His story collection, VOLT, is an incredible book that’s had a tremendous reception, but I don’t think anybody would say that it’s similar to The Mistakes. He finished grad school just as I started, but we had basically the exact same teachers and the exact same classes. We were subject to the same cutter; so why are our cookies so different? If you really want to see some homogenous, risk-averse literature, then let the market take over completely.

It’s hard to be an outspoken champion of such programs, because they do have their issues. And I was no MFA darling; I barely got into grad school at all. But we live in a culture with a long tradition of gutting public support for artists and the arts; that’s a bandwagon I simply can’t get behind. I tend to agree with what David Berman said, when asked a similar question: “Let the kids write; some of them will blow your mind.” Even if most of their books suck, that’s still a price I’m willing to pay to have my mind blown once in a while.

You’re a male writer, yet The Mistakes is written from a female perspective.  Do you think it’s risky writing from a point of view that is different from one’s own?

Risky is a good word for it. At least it felt that way at the start. I’d worked with female protagonists before, but never in first person. I remember thinking that if I made Laura enough of a tomboy, I might get away with it—an idea that sounds utterly ridiculous to me now.

From very early on, it was obvious that the narrator of this book had to be a woman. Still, I don’t see how the story could function without Laura telling it. So I took it on as a necessary challenge. And I really enjoyed the voice she has: short, simple sentences spiked with sarcasm. It was refreshing and fun. But once I did start showing it to people, I was mortified that I might not have gotten Laura right. I’m lucky that my early readers were all kind and constructive. I was so sensitive about the female-narrator thing; if they’d been dismissive or told me I didn’t understand how women think, I might’ve scrapped the whole project.

Looking back, writing this way was an incredibly important lesson for me. Above all else, the pressure I felt was to make Laura convincing. In literary fiction circles, we emphasize characterization—for good reason. But I think we can sometimes erroneously interpret that emphasis as meaning we must invent highly original or unique characters. Working in Laura’s voice, I learned it was more important that she be believable than original.

When I was in the early stages of The Mistakes, I read Elise Blackwell’s Grub—which is a brilliant satire of publishing and fiction writers. It includes a gifted young writer character that spends years on his opus—narrated by a woman. In a hilarious scene, a bunch of readers grumble about his novel.

One of their chief complaints is that it’s full of these long asides about menstruation. I remember reading that and thinking to myself: “I’m not going to mention menstruation in my novel.” It sounds silly, but it was actually this major moment of enlightenment. Like: it’s my book, I don’t have to go there if I don’t want to. More importantly: this is Laura’s story, not a showcase of my ability to write from a woman’s perspective.

Further Links and Resources